I hope everyone’s enjoying their weekend!
Just a couple of nights back, the band and I got invited to play for a party sponsored by a radio station. For those who don’t know I play guitar for a band which does cover songs of the 80s. It really wasn’t a difficult choice… most of the guys in not all, grew up in the 80s and are familiar with all these songs… songs that we listened to on the charts back in the day, and songs that you hardly hear on today’s radio or hear a band playing. Rather ironic considering that all of us have had past successes in other bands doing original material.
The event? The 2nd Anniversary party for Bootleg Gold; it’s a 3 hour classic rock radio show that airs Fridays at 4PM over Y101, and has proven to have a strong following; if its 2 year run time is not proof enough that it has established its niche, the huge crowd that came to the party, “by invitation only”, should put doubts to rest.
We were just fronting for the main act though, a classic rock band from Manila who came in the genres image… the way they were dressed and all I felt like I was in Woodstock in the 60s.
A few days before the event, the producers of the show were asking us if we could play a 70s song, in a sort of segue into the main act, which I brought up with the guys who were adamant about not doing the song, because it would be totally off; when all of the songs on the set list are 80s then suddenly you cap off with a Led Zep. I have nothing against the song or the band they were asking us to cover, in fact I have much respect for the band and was open to the idea of playing the song, but the rest of the guys did have a point. We are an 80s cover band, and we will have to keep with the positioning, if only to reinforce the image and further establish ourselves in that niche.
Sometimes, even if you feel you have found a good niche, you still are tempted to try to make adjustments to please another set of customers, and tweak a product further which only ruins the product because your tweaking to please an added small percentage of people who were not your primary target in the first place, caused you to lose out on your captured audience.
Bootleg Gold celebrated its 2nd year anniversary on air… a radio show that remains because it clearly provides something to its listeners, classic rock music and features; something that they do without any competition. They dominate that niche.
The band I play with does 80s songs; when was the last time you heard Mad World by TFF on the radio or performed live? Or maybe this one song which we used to open our set… U2’s Where the Streets Have No Name… do you get to hear that on the radio often or have you heard a band play that live? NO. So the band has also found that niche, serves it… and since there is no other band I know of locally that does that, we dominate that niche.
A key component of a successful business is a good niche, your target market; and your knowledge of that niche… understanding it and knowing how to serve it is critical, and could mean longevity for your business.
The internet works similarly. Before I even start doing anything online I always do some checking.. Is there a market? Is there a niche that can be served? Is that niche “swipe ready”; are the primed enough to whip out their credit cards and buy your product. How much are they willing to spend for the particular product you have in mind. Anyway, all that revolves around selling something, but there are several other ways of making money online, that there are several other purposes for niche examination. I would sometimes do research on an online niche just to find out the specific numbers… how much traffic I could get if I put up a site that caters to that niche and I could make money from it.
Niche research is actually one of the easiest things to do online. Not only is data easy to find, but it is also free. However, the thing about making money online is, its about speed and consistency. The internet grows exponentially every day and so does the competition; more people are going online to make money and so niches and business ideas are fleeting.
As I said earlier niche research on the internet is easy and free, however time consuming… and on the internet, you do not have time to waste. If there is one piece of advice that I hear over and over again from the experts and the gurus… it’s always.. get up and go! Do it immediately and don’t wait… don’t get stuck in what they call “analysis paralysis”, you think or analyze something too much for too long you don’t realize you had wasted precious time and that niche you were considering might already have been milked and gone.
So what do people do to fast track the niche research process? They create software or tools that assist you in niche research; and that there is not free. The truth is, one of my most worthy investments online… is one niche examination tool called the Niche Inspector. In almost everything that I do online, I always use it to verify a niche. Actually I use two niche examination tools, but Niche Inspector is one that I use most of the time since it is a program installed right on my PC and thus really easy to use.
My investment on the Niche Inspector? A onetime payment of $127, and you get the program and unending support and upgrades.
So how do I use the Niche Inspector?
Some posts ago, I mentioned that I had made like $5 in a day from Google Adsense. I made that money while I slept and did not have to do anything to earn it. And that money came from one click on one website. If you would like to make money through Google Adsense, all you got to do is simply put up a website that caters to specific high paying niches and slap on some Google Ads. To signficantly increase your daily income, you simply don’t put up just one site, you put up several tens, or hundreds of sites that could earn an average of $.50 - 5 per day each. Do the math and think about how much you could be making. Which is why, you need to be constantly researching niches, and that process gets automated by the Niche Inspector. I just let it run and I check on it every now and then for good niches. When I do find one with potential I do some additional checking, then if all is good, I move forward and prepare to build the site.
The ideas is; with Niche Inspector you are able to find out which niches are viable.. meaning. On the internet, viable niches are keywords that have high search volumes on the search engines, do not have that many competing websites, and are known to have high paying Adwords Ads for those specific keywords.
What I do is simply look for a niche, see if I could get good traffic with it, find out how much competition I have, and find out if each click is worth dollars and not just cents.
Of course that is just the Adsense Income model I am talking about, there are many other uses for the Niche Inspector. In fact that is what I also use when I tweak my clients’ websites, and optimize these websites to get more traffic from search engines.
In closing, it is without argument that discovering and understanding your niche is important in business, whether online or physical… but what is even more important is first discovering and properly researching and verifying if in the first place you have a viable niche. Establishing a niche market’s potential or lack of it could save you a lot of time and money… and might stop you from plunging into a business that would eventually plunge.
cforms contact form by delicious:days
